No Casualties in Magnitude 5.2 Quake near Tehran

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – There were no casualties in a magnitude 5.2 earthquake that hit Malard, a town in Iran’s Tehran province, on Wednesday night, a spokesman for the Iranian Crisis Management Organization said.

Behnam Saeedi told Tasnim that no casualties or serious damage have been reported since the temblor.

According to the Seismological Center of the Institute of Geophysics of Tehran University, the quake hit at 23:27 local time (1957 GMT) at a depth of seven kilometers on the border of Tehran and Alborz provinces.

The epicenter of the tremor was located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of the capital.

Mortza Redmare, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society in a televised interview asked people to stay calm.

The quake resulted in minor panic in Tehran province, prompting people to take to the streets and public places.

This comes as Iran is still reeling from a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, its deadliest in over a decade, which hit the western province of Kermanshah on November 11, killing more than 600 people and causing extensive material damage there.